Ἐπιούσιος?

[Timothée]

The word ἐπιούσιος is found in the Lord’s Prayer. Both Matthew 6: 11 and Luke 11: 3 have the exactly same wording “τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον”.

What can we say for certain about ἐπιούσιος—and what is merely air? Can we approach this etymologically from the (feminine) participle of εἶναι? I am given to understand that it’s all but a ἅπαξ λεγόμενον. Why would Luke and Matthew opt to use so rare a word? Or did it perhaps circulate widely in the early Christian community by bush telegraph, the collective memory hence preventing changing it? May we regard it as a word coined by Christians? What a singular word.

[jeidsath]

What about περιούσιος? At Ex. 19:5 the translators of the Septuagint used περιούσιος (also quoted in the NT at Ep. Titus):

ἔσεσθέ μοι λαὸς περιούσιος ἀπὸ πάντων τῶν ἐθνῶν

περι- seems to function adverbially in the word as an intensifier, and περιούσιος must mean "very own" in both Exodus and Titus. If ἐπιούσιος was an on-the-spot coinage from περιούσιος, the switch from περι- to επι- seems clear enough. Rather that bread to own, this is bread to eat. It's given to you, so that you own it, but with a purpose beyond ownership. Hence επι-.

[mwh]

επιουσιος seems still to be a bit of a mystery, and I frankly find it odd that neither it nor anything very much like it has yet turned up in papyri (other than as a misreading). Superficially it may look parallel to περιουσιος, which might imply analysis as επι-ουσιος(?!). But the meaning of περιουσιος in its occurrence in the Septuagint, while seemingly unique, is perfectly unexceptionable, perfectly in line with περιεῖναι denoting superiority. The same can’t be said of επιουσιος vis-à-vis επεῖναι!

I think we should be looking not to εἶναι but to ἰέναι. I’d take επιουσιος to be an adjective formed on the basis of the very common ἡ επιουσα (ημερα), see LSJ ἔπειμι (B) II.1. Νo other explanation seems at all plausible to me. Then the prayer is for bread for the coming day (as distinct from bread for subsequent days, cf. Matt.6.34 μη ουν μεριμνησητε εις την αυριον). I haven’t read any of the modern literature on this—which I’m sure is very extensive, and very tralatitious—but only Jerome, to whom the word was evidently unknown outside of this particular context. He couldn’t even make up his mind how to interpret it, but the etymology implicit in his hilarious supersubstantialem for the Matthew occurrence surely can’t be right?

See also http://www.textkit.com/greek-latin-foru ... 3&p=177993.

[Timothée]

Thank you, Joel and mwh, for your replies. ’Twas very silly of me to think of εἶναι. An elementary mistake! I suppose the moment I first saw the word I unconsciously divided it **ἐπι-ούσιος and then was unable to see it anew. We do have to conjecture an elision ἐπ’ on the preverb. Hence, ἐπ-ιούσιος.

You surely must be correct. It now seems right evident that the current syntagm ἡ ἐπιοῦσα ἡμέρα gave rise to ἐπιούσιος. It’s perfectly logical derivation. Thus, I presume, ‘Give us today/every day the tomorrow’s bread of ours.’ A slightly strange way of putting it, mind, but it is the original sense, I’m positive now. Matthew looks at the situation more punctually with aorist imperative δός and σήμερον, Luke in a more general manner with present imperative δίδου and more distributive τὸ καθ’ ἡμέραν.

I think it is good to view these matters without the millennial burden and ballast of all the theological musings.

[jeidsath]

Frisk doesn't like either ἡ ἐπιοῦσα (ἡμέρα) -- because it's a prayer "for the coming day" as mwh mentions, or ἐπὶ τὴν οὖσαν (ἡμέραν), which would be harder to transform to this word, despite giving the correct meaning. But I don't see why "for the coming day" would have to be wrong, as Frisk assumes. I wonder how the Church (pre-Jerome) interpreted it?

In addition to Matthew and Luke, the Didache also has the same phrase. On the other hand, it's clear that for Luke and the Didache, the prayer has become its own thing, "The Lord's Prayer." Βut for Matthew, it's just part of an overall discussion of how to pray, and bleeds seamlessly into verse 14. Almost as if Matthew is the original source.

Maybe Matthew could have originally written ἐσθιόντων or some variation? Give us the bread we eat today? It would explain why the word isn't found in papyri. I suppose that ἐπιούσιον "for the coming day" must be the most likely explanation though.

[Timothée]

Didache! Thank you, Joel. I saw a reference Did. 8: 2 and could only think of Didymus, which made little sense...

As Beekes reproduces the Frisk in English, he walks along the same path (‘The most obvious interpretation — — suggests “for the coming day”, but this seems improbable’). Chantraine says, ‘L’interprétation ne donne pas une signification satisfaisante.’ So they don’t like it because of its meaning. I still don’t buy their view. This holy etymological triumvirate, by the bye, all mention also a Sammelbuch (5224:20), which they say is an economic text. This source is totally strange to me.

Do we have these passages in the Vetus Latina?

It’s an interesting question, when the prayer became “its own thing”—and where it originally derives from.

[mwh]

Is praying what people would do first thing in the morning, before starting the day? If we imagine the prayer as being made at daybreak, τον αρτον τον επιουσιον will mean bread for the coming day, i.e. for today, never mind about tomorrow. (That’s why I adduced what Jesus says at the end of his instructions, Mt.6.34.) That’s how ἡ ἐπιοῦσα ἡμέρα is used in the early dawn conversation that opens Plato’s Crito, where Socrates says ου τοινυν της επιουσης ημερας οιμαι αυτο ἥξειν αλλα της ἑτερας, “So I reckon it won’t be here the coming day (i.e. today) but the next (i.e. tomorrow).”

[jeidsath]

Re: Sammelbuch

It's Sammelbuch griechischer Urkunden aus Ägypten. 5224:20 is a shopping list, with the word written next to several items. According to B-Greek, the original transcription was wrong and the word is ελαιου:

> I had to finish my studies before september and thought it would
> take too much time (and money) to order a photo of the papyrus. But
> I was in luck a second time! For Dr. Worp told me he had received
> an e-mail from Yale that morning. Professor B. Porten an Arameicus
> from Israel was in Yale. Dr. Worp asked him by e-mail whether it
> was possible for him to go to the Beinecke Library to take a look.
> He was so kind to do it. and provided us with a xerox of papyrus
> P.C.+YBR inv 19. On 15 June 1998 he wrote an e-mail to tell that he
> and Professor A. Crislip had made a xerox and posted it. They
> couldn't find the word epiousi.. in te papyrus. They read the
> complete word elaiou (oil). When we received the xerox Dr. Worp
> told me that the word in the papyrus was indeed elaiou. He also
> said the papyrus was definitely from the first or second century CE
> and not from the fifth century CE. Sayce was indeed very inaccurate.

[Timothée]

Thank you, mwh. That’s exactly the kind of explanation I was hoping to exist. Besides, I love how we (read: you) are making small contributions to the classical scholarship. The Platonic parallel is especially valuable. Maybe this sounds pretentious, but it does seem to me the aenigma of ἐπιούσιος has now been solved.

Thanks for the knowledge on the Sammelbuch, Joel. There’re these things circulating in handbooks that are unfortunately only copied from one to another without ever checking them.

[jeidsath]

I realize what the objection to "the coming day" is. It doesn't fit Luke (which is also the liturgical version for most Churches):

τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δίδου ἡμῖν τὸ καϑ’ ἡμέραν

Accepting "the coming day" would imply that Luke had only a vague understanding of ἐπιούσιον. However, notice that under "the coming day" interpretation, the text of the Didache is complete in itself:

τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δὸς ἡμῖν

To this, both Matthew and Luke provide a gloss. Matthew has σήμερον, and Luke has τὸ καϑ’ ἡμέραν. I wonder if Matthew had something Didache-like as a source? The Didache as we have it seems to be a summary of something else.

***Confusingly, most online texts for the Didache have τὸ ἐπιούσιον, but the 1894 print version of Bryennios disagree. I'll assume for now that τὸ is a modern typo.

EDIT: The missing σήμερον appears to be another problem with the digital edition. The quote from the print editions that I have found is: τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δὸς ἡμῖν σήμερον.

[Timothée]

Can we not think of it as ‘give us day by day the bread for the following day’, i.e. the need for the bread of the following day recurs daily? Or then the meaning had already changed a little apud Luke, as you suggest—or he indeed misused it, as the English mix up factoid with trivia and peruse with glance.

[mwh]

I don’t suppose it’s right, but the idea that σημερον and το(ν) καθ’ημεραν are independent glosses on επιουσιον is quite an attractive one. The former comes closer to what must be the original meaning (our bread “for the day ahead” is how I would render it), the latter corresponds to what seems to have been a widespread interpretation before Jerome, who accepted it in Luke. And prayers are especially liable to expansion, as comparison of Luke’s version of this prayer with Matthew’s longer one (itself further expanded at the end by the doxology) is enough to show.

Where people have gone wrong, from very early days, is in considering the word in lexical isolation, as a Ding an sich; and early theologians, ignorant of morphology, inevitably associated it with “being” and οὐσια and such. But viewed in the light of τῇ ἐπιούσῃ (ἡμέρᾳ) and suchlike phrases the meaning is pretty transparent, and contextually apt in Luke as well as Matt./Did. At the same time, the early (mis)interpretations, perpetuated in modern translations and church doctrine, indicate what the word’s historical meaning was and is. (Meaning or meanings: I see the Catholic Church takes it every which way.)

The Sammelbuch document is what I was alluding to when I said at the outset that the word hasn’t yet been found in papyri except as a misreading.

[Markos]

Ἐπιούσιος ἄρτος -- ὁ τῇ ἐκάστῃ οὐσίᾳ ἡμῶν ἁρμόζων...

https://ia801206.us.archive.org/35/item ... 812%29.pdf

[mwh]

Favorino copied that from a representative of an late-antique compilation known as the Synagoge, the “Collection of Useful Words." That makes it a little more valuable than if he’d written it himself as a Catholic bishop, for it confirms that this misinterpretation of the word was current in later antiquity—which however we already knew. τῇ ἐκάστῃ οὐσίᾳ is garbled for ἐπὶ τῇ οὐσίᾳ (pseudo-etymological), and I suspect ἁρμόζων should simply be ἄρτος.

More pertinently, Jerome records that what he calls the Gospel according to Hebrews had “mahar,” meaning “tomorrow’s.” I take that as implying a correct understanding of ἐπιούσιος’s formation.

And if the prayer came to be recited each day (perhaps several times a day as the Didache prescribes, cf. Muslim ritual), “our daily bread” comes effectively close to “our bread for the day ahead,” so the “daily” interpretation may also reflect a true understanding of the word.

[Timothée]

We’ve now quite well covered ἐπιούσιος. I read the supersubstantial thread. Are you referring to Jerome’s commentary on a gospel? So Jerome translates this in two ways in the Vulgate. Supersubstantiālis (super ~ ἐπί, substantia ~ οὐσία) is quite transparent, translated ‘zum Lebensunterhalte notwendig’ by Georges and exactly the same way by L&S (‘necessary to support life’). It’s of course coined by Jerome. What did Jerome not get—or what do we not get about Jerome? You are giving to understand, by referring to Hebrew, that Jerome understood this better than what we may think. Is it all about a theology of a kind?

[mwh]

Yes his comm. on the Matthew gospel. You can find Migne’s ed. online as a pdf; col. 43 is the relevant one.
In his translation of the verse he writes supersubstantialem (that’s the last time I’m going to type that glorious silly word!), and then in his commentary he starts by linking επιουσιος with περιουσιος (cf. Joel’s first post), and glosses it “peculiarem vel praecipuum.” Then, in the bit that caught my attention, he reports that “in Evangelio quod appellatur secundum Hebraeos” he’s found MAHAR (and the ?Hebrew is given—Migne has a learned note) “quod dicitur crastinum.” (The gospel he refers to is identified by more recent scholars with the Gospel of the Nazoreans/Nazarenes, distinct from the Gospel of the Hebrews.) Then he glosses his own supersub. panem as “qui super omnes substantias [i.e. οὐσίας] sit, et universas superet creaturas”—so yes, theologically inspired balderdash built on a false etymology. So no, I am not suggesting that Jerome understood this “better than what we may think,” but it looks as if he had access to sources that understood it better than he did.

[jeidsath]

If the MAHAR connection is real, then isn't επιουσιον just a copyist's mistake for επαυριον?

αὔριον is how the Septuagint usually translates MAHAR. If it was Matthew's source, I imagine he's translate similarly. And if it's derivative from Matthew, it's hard to imagine the translator knowing this rare word better than Luke or later Christians (unless, of course, the translator were Matthew himself).

[Timothée]

Hieronymus studies are a thing of their own, aren’t they? It’s much too vast for me to know where to start, though I dunno if I wanted to. But I found the page in Migne you mentioned, here, on the 15th page of the PDF.

I fail to see why we would need posit an **ἐπαύριον. Ἐπιούσιος ‘pertaining to the day ahead’ is perfectly explained above. The Hebrew מָחָר (māḥār) means ‘next day, tomorrow’ (HALOT), being particularly common in Exodus. We also have the collocation יוֹם מָחָר (jōm māḥār) ‘the day of tomorrow’, and with preposition לְמָחָר (lᵉmāḥār). A perfectly good word would hardly emerge from a scribal error.

[jeidsath]

I fail to see why we would need posit an **ἐπαύριον. Ἐπιούσιος ‘pertaining to the day ahead’ is perfectly explained above. The Hebrew מָחָר (māḥār) means ‘next day, tomorrow’ (HALOT), being particularly common in Exodus. We also have the collocation יוֹם מָחָר (jōm māḥār) ‘the day of tomorrow’, and with preposition לְמָחָר (lᵉmāḥār). A perfectly good word would hardly emerge from a scribal error.

I think that this is a fair argument, but I'm going to do my best to construct the case against it.

1) Nobody (with the possibly exception of a Hebrew/Aramaic witness) seems to have understood ἐπιούσιον in antiquity.
2) ἐπιούσιον doesn't have any papyrus witnesses.
3) Does the classical phrase ἐπιοῦσα ἡμέρα (I ran into another example yesterday at Anabasis 3.4.18) ever drop the ἡμέρα? The gives us two steps before we get to the proposed adjectival form.
4) What can we expect a scribe to have conjectured when confronted with something like ΕΠ*Υ*ΙΟΝ or ΕΠΑΥ*ΙΟΝ?
5) What exactly is our explanation for MAHAR? Is it a source or a translation? If a source, why wasn't it translated αὔριον like in the Septuagint? If a translation, would the translator have been more likely to have understood ΕΠΙΟΥΣΙΟΝ or ΕΠΑΥΡΙΟΝ in his source as MAHAR?

But I really think that it just comes down to number 3. Just how likely is a word like this to exist (in the absence of other evidence for it)? And I will bow to you and mwh on that.

[mwh]

αὔριον is how the Septuagint usually translates MAHAR. If it was Matthew's source, I imagine he's translate similarly. And if it's derivative from Matthew, it's hard to imagine the translator knowing this rare word better than Luke or later Christians (unless, of course, the translator were Matthew himself).

I agree with the first argument; that indicates that the “Matthew” gospel is not dependent on Jerome’s “Hebrews” gospel, though they were close enough for Jerome to adduce the latter in his exegesis of Matthew.
I’m not at all persuaded by the second. I’m proposing that mahar translates επιουσιον correctly understood as cognate with τη(ς) επιουση(ς). And I see no reason to think Luke understood it any differently. (Only when the theologians got to work on it—and they really went to town on it—was it held to be cognate with ουσια. Origen first?)*

And while it’s fun to imagine that the Lord’s Prayer derives from a copying error, the fact that mahar could also translate αυριον is no reason to put forward the bizarre idea that επιουσιον is “just a copyist’s mistake for επαυριον.”

That’s enough from me. My posts are becoming sub-substantial.

PS. On Joel’s new query: the ημερα is very often dispensed with. See the LSJ ref. I gave in my first post, which even cites Acts 16.11, τῇ δὲ ἐπιούσῃ (sans ἡμέρᾳ). In τῇ ἐπιούσῃ νυκτί on the other hand νυκτί has to be present: Acts 23.11 (where we would say “That night …”).
Give it up, Joel!

*It’s instructive to read Origen, as I’ve just done: de oratore 27 + fr.181. He’s familiar with both etymologies, and of course he opts for the wrong one: δοκεῖ μοι ἑκατέρα λέξις [επιουσιος and περιουσιος] παρὰ τὴν οὐσίαν πεποιῆσθαι, ἡ μὲν τὸν εἰς τὴν οὐσίαν συμβαλλόμενον ἄρτον δηλοῦσα, …. Has any significant progress been made since then?

[Timothée]

My warm thanks to you. As I said, I earnestly feel we have made contributions. What remains to be explained is why Jerome was undecided, but maybe that is inexplicable; maybe simply interdum dormitat ipse Homerus.